


build me a hearth and home

by chuchisushi



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-13
Updated: 2014-07-13
Packaged: 2018-02-08 15:23:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,671
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1946220
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chuchisushi/pseuds/chuchisushi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Kakashi acquires a child and meets Iruka.</p><p><b>Contains (Highlight to view):</b> <span class="spoiler">Parent death (not main character(s)), Kakashi exhibiting a terrible grasp of good parenting</span></p><p><b>Prompt/Scenario:</b> #16 by manekineko77: Modern-day AU, Kakashi finds himself nearing 30 and saddled with a kid (toddler) as a result of his misspent youth. Time to get his shit together and grow up at last. Thank god for that kind teacher next-door, popular with all the moms and aunties in the neighbourhood, who seems almost too enthusiastic in his offers to help with li'l Hatake...</p>
            </blockquote>





	build me a hearth and home

**Author's Note:**

> This is actually.... not the entire fic!! Oh god. My sincere apologies for this, because I had honestly intended to write something beautiful and lovely and entertaining and most of all, _long_ , but then life saw my ambitions and suplexed me in the solar plexus in retaliation. So this isn't nearly the full fic, aha... There's so much in this verse that I want to write but unfortunately couldn't in the amount of time I had between moving and graduating from college - so I'll have to beg for your forgiveness and patience! I'll be uploading and updating this fic beyond the scope of the fest - just please bear with me until then ;v;/

He receives the letter on May the 5th and has to read it twice before the meaning starts to set in.

Hatake Kakashi is twenty-eight, going on thirty, and had given up on fulfilling anything resembling the expectations of others: he spends his days being casually unemployed, living off of a massive inheritance, with eight dogs squeezed in with himself into a too-small apartment, and generally pretending like the years hadn't passed and that he was still twenty-one.

He guesses, after the fifth reread of the clinically-worded email, that he should have been expecting something like this as a result of the above.

\--

Her name is Hatake Azami, and Kakashi can't decide if it was a shot at him or _her_. His first thought, when he meets her face-to-face is, inanely, _she's tiny._

She's four, and he can't decide if that's the universe laughing at him or not.

He hadn't been going to take her in. When he'd called in to the official line, gotten through to a stressed and harassed-sounding woman, he hadn't intended to walk away from it forty-five minutes later with an appointment to drive down to the state center to meet her before the paperwork was finalized.

When he sees her, he thinks that she doesn't look much like him - beyond the white hair that she'd inherited - and then she actually looks up and directly at him and the steel-grey gaze that fixes on him is the whole version of the half that he sees in the mirror every morning. She has a Dora the Explorer bandaid on her cheek.

"What happened?" he asks, casually, eyes fixed on it and her, and he sees the woman from yesterday, the instigator of the surprisingly-convincing phone call, grimace from out of the corner of his eye. 

"She got into a fight," she says, and Kakashi makes a neutral sort of noise in response. Azami and he are still staring at each other.

"Did she win?" he asks, and then chuckles when the woman squawks in indignation. 

He saunters over to where Azami sits, interrupted in her coloring, and squats beside her, settling into an easy crouch; she stares at him consideringly, and then tilts her head to the side like a tiny bird. Her eyelashes are very white against the coppery tone of her skin - something inherited from her birth mother. Kakashi remembers said mother - a fleeting moment between here and there, a meeting at a local bookstore on a weekend that had turned into coffee and him taking her back to his apartment. She'd left Sunday morning wearing a cheeky smile and his clothes; he'd never gotten them back. He remembers the freckles across the bridge of her nose, that had dusted her shoulders and the slope of her breasts, the way she'd twirled the ends of her hair, and the way she'd cursed like a sailor when she'd stubbed her toe coming back to bed at some unholy hour in the morning.

She's dead, and this is all that's left of her that he has. He didn't know her for long, but it doesn't make it sting any less.

"Your name's Hatake Azami?" he asks her, and she nods. "My name's Hatake Kakashi," and she nods again. "You know who I am?"

"My dad," she replies, and Kakashi has to take a moment to let that sink in before he can respond. "Why are your eyes different colors?"

"One's fake," he replies without thinking about it, brain still stuck on the concept of being a _father_ , and then immediately backpedals when the interest in Azami's eyes sharpens to needle points. "I'm not going to take it out to show you."

"Oh." She sounds disappointed, and if that's not another indication that she's his daughter, he doesn't know what is.

“Would you mind living with me?” Kakashi asks, and Azami seems to consider him in his entirety in that moment, from his toes to the top of his hair, and Kakashi holds his breath through her scrutiny, unsure of what will happen.

“... Momma’s not coming back, they said,” is her reply. “But she says she named me after you. So okay.”

And Kakashi exhales, nods, and says, “Okay.”

\--

It’s not as easy as that, of course.

He doesn’t have the first idea of how to take care of a kid - puppies, okay, he can deal with. Children (much less children that are actually related to him), greatly less so.

The first thing he’d realized when all the red-tape hoops had been jumped through, after he’d spent a sleepless night reading everything he could find about taking care of four-year-olds, after he’d given up and sent Rin a text and hoped to god that the sand hadn’t fried her cellphone, after he’d gotten back her reply that consisted her laughing at him before explaining the basics, when he’d finally bought what he’d needed and when he'd finally managed to bring Azami _home_ (to the enthusiastic approval of his pack), was that he was going to need more room.

The second thing he’d done after making sure neither child nor dogs were going to maul each other was open the lockbox he kept wedged between the back of the couch and the wall of the apartment and fish out the keys to his house from it.

“Pup, you still up for going somewhere?” he’d called out. Azami’s response had been punctuated by a squeal of delight because of a dog, so Kakashi had decided to leave further journeying for tomorrow, when both she and the pack weren’t quite as excited.

The inheritance hadn’t been the only thing his parents had left him - the house was the other, the place that he’d grown up in and that had held a multitude of agonizingly bittersweet memories after his parents’ deaths. He kept someone hired to drop in every month or so, air the place out, but he’d sold most of the furniture and put the rest in storage before turning around and joining the Army. He hadn’t been back since.

“I am not sure I’m ready for this,” he’d confessed quietly to Pakkun that night from where he’d been stretched out on the couch; the pug had chuffed from the vicinity of the floor and and then gotten up just to jump onto his chest, making Kakashi grunt.

“Then again,” Kakashi had added, scratching the doge behind the ears, “when have I ever looked before I leapt?”

\----

Kakashi meets Iruka a week later in the middle of cleaning out the garage; when Iruka knocks on the frame of the large, open, bay door, Kakashi jumps in surprise and thoroughly slams his head against the shelf he’s under, sending a frankly embarrassing amount of dust puffing into the air, and forcing a pained noise out of him.

“Oh god! I’m sorry, are you alright?? I didn’t mean to sneak up on you like that - ” and then there’s a man next to Kakashi, kneeling uncaringly on the disgusting floor in a pair of nice slacks and gently probing at the spot that Kakashi’s clutching with tan, square fingers. “Well, it didn’t break skin, so that’s a relief. Are you okay, though? No dizziness?”

“I just bumped my head. Don’t worry, I’ve had worse. My skull's hard,” Kakashi manages against the barrage of concern from the stranger (he ignores how the flash of pain had sent panic through him on the wings of memory), and pulls away from the other man’s hands. “Er. Sorry, but - who are you?”

“Iruka,” the man replies, and then immediately adds, “Your eyes are different colors…?”

“Yeah, they’re supposed to be like that,” Kakashi responds. He pauses, and then smiles up at Iruka a little ruefully. “Nice to meet you, then, Iruka. Uh. I guess you live in the neighborhood as well?”

Iruka looks startled for a moment before sheepishness sets in; he raises a hand to scratch at the back of his head and tug once at the ponytail he sports. _A nervous tick?_ Kakashi wonders. “Ah, right, sorry - yes I do. I heard something about a new neighbor with a lot of dogs, so I thought I’d come by and say hello - ” 

Both their attentions are diverted suddenly at the quiet, “Kakashi?” from the door to the house; they turn in unison, and Azami blinks almost owlishly at them both in response, her attention bobbing between Kakashi and Iruka. The hand she has on Guruko’s back tightens in his fur. “Heard voices…?”

“... Naruto didn’t tell me about her,” Iruka murmurs, and Kakashi is 99% sure he wasn’t supposed to hear that.

“This is Iruka,” Kakashi says instead of anything else he _could_ say. “He came by to say hello.”

“Oh,” Azami says. She scrutinizes Iruka like she’s looking right into his soul with her eyes that are so like Kakashi’s, and Iruka, astonishingly, smiles brightly and waves back at her.

She blushes. Guruko barks. Kakashi stares at both of them in surprise, and then glances at Iruka once before looking back at the two.

“Hi Iruka,” Azami says, before disappearing back into the house like a tiny ghost; Kakashi, if possible, stares even harder.

“Um,” he says into the slightly awkward almost-silence between himself and Iruka, as the sound of one child’s footsteps and the clicking of one dog’s nails fades. “I think she likes you?” 

“I didn’t know you had a kid?” Iruka replies.

Kakashi rubs at the back of his neck and shifts his weight where he sits on the garage floor. “Yeah,” he says, and then tries to think of a good way to say ‘I had a weekend fling with her mother and never saw either of them again until about a week ago, when I found out she died, but she gave her my last name, so I adopted her,’ before giving up and saying, “Yeah,” again.

“And eight dogs,” he adds after a second. “They’re almost like kids.”

Iruka stares at him silently for a few seconds - before bursting into loud laughter.

**Author's Note:**

> Remember to leave a comment below, or at the [LJ post](http://kakairu-fest.livejournal.com/126236.html?mode=reply#add_comment)!


End file.
